Freedgood 2006

Elaine Freedgood. The Ideas in Things: Fugitive Meaning in the Victorian Novel. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006.

General Notes

• how to connect the narrative unconscious and the textual unconscious? A McLeodian and Freedgoodian reading?

Chapter Notes

Intro

• 1: [Epigraph] The past is hidden somewhere outside the realm beyond the reach of intellect, in some material object...which we do not suspect. -- Proust, Du cote de chez Swann
• Even with the recent critical attention to the detail, the fetish, and material culture, the "things" of novels still do not get taken seriously - that is to say, they do not get interpreted - much of the time.
• Claim: The Ideas in Things assumes that critical cultural archives have been preserved, unsuspected, in the things of realism that have been so little or so lightly read.
• 3: [Weak metonymic reading vs strong] ...understanding the widest possible range of meanings for, let's say, the mahogany furniture in Jane Eyre requires that one learn about the history of the depletion of mahogany in Madeira and in the Caribbean (the two major sources of wealth in the novel)...and what those innovations signified, culturally speaking, in the Victorian period.
• This process does not tend toward a "reading" of the novel in any traditional sense. Instead it seeks what Pierre Macherey has described as a moment of "splitting" within the novel, the point at which we can catch sight of the "division which is its unconscious, in so far as it possesses one." This divided unconscious allows us to glimpse the "play of history beyond its edges, encroaching on those edges." This splitting, this less-than-fully-narrated appearance of history makes it possible "to trace the path which leads from the haunted work to that which haunts it."
  • cf. Randy McLeod about the "textual unconscious"
• 4: Conceptual method: ...I do eventually develop interpretive allegories in which I follow the narrative logic of the novel more closely than I do in the strong metonymic readings which I begin, but I delay such readings until I have the knowledge of the collector. [cf. Benjamin Arcades about allegorist/collector]
• In the nineteenth century, "what Barthes calls the 'world of goods' got used to itself" and things began "to demand visibility." [qting Cynthia Wall] The increasing respectability of increasingly detailed description makes for the emblematic hodgepodge of the Victorian novel.
• 5: ...it allows me to avoid the routinized literary figuration that precludes the interpretation of most of the things of realism.
• ...method of the first 3 chapters of this book: one in which the historically and theoretically overdetermined material characteristics of objects are sought out beyond the immediate [6] context in which they appear. These objects are then returned to their novelistic homes, so that they can inhabit them with a radiance or resonance of meaning they have not possessed or have not legitimately possessed in previous literary-critical reading.
• 6: I argue that George Eliot...begins to restrict and assign meaning to fictional objects
• ...structures of meaning-making build up in such hermeneutic displays [as the plain dress in Middlemarch]: this is the readerly text in the process of becoming a writerly one, that is to say, this is a text that teaches readers how to rightly "write" that which is unwritten in literary language....In my account of it, the readerly text is a structure in which a reader can be writerly with objects.
• 7: ...where desire emerges and dives to its death, repeatedly - fortunately enough for nineteenth-century publishing [what to make of this?].
  • how to connect the narrative unconscious and the textual unconscious?
• Reliability and reproducibility in literary meaning making require the stability of metaphors rather than the unpredictability of metonyms.
• ...I will argue that mid-Victorians, and the objects in their novels, were not fully in the grip of the kind of fetishism Marx and Marxists have ascribed to industrial culture.
• 8: A host of ideas resided in Victorian things: abstraction, alienation, and spectacularization had to compete for space with other kinds of object relations - ones that we have perhaps yet to appreciate.
• [Defintion:] Victorian thing culture: a more extravagant form of object relations than ours, one in which systems of value were not quarantined from one another and ideas of interest and meaning were perhaps far less restricted than they are for us.